In recent years data-sharing has been a recurring focus of struggle within the scientific research community as improvements in information technology and digital networks have expanded the ways that data can be produced, disseminated, and used. Information technology makes it easier to share...

Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public...

This report addresses a deceptively simple question: How can the productivity of American health care be substantially improved? Productivity, in lay terms, is the ratio of output to inputs. A more colloquial rendition of the question might be: how can we get a lot more bang for our health care...

We the undersigned professors of law and economics offer this comment on the USPTO’s notice of proposed rulemaking to change how the Patent Trial and Appeal Board will construe patent claims in its administrative trial proceedings. As a group, our research explores a wide range of issues in...

The campaign to curtail "fraud and abuse" in the Medicare and Medicaid programs represents an attempt by regulators to evade more fundamental and difficult questions regarding cost and quality control. In the Medicare arena, tackling these larger questions will require dismantling the program's...

Only about 1% of newly developed drugs are for tropical diseases, such as African sleeping sickness and dengue fever. While patent incentives and commercial pharmaceutical companies have made Western health care the envy of the world, the commercial model works only if companies can sell enough...

Under well-settled patent law, the decision regarding whether to grant or deny a patent turns on technical fact-finding. Recommendations made in recent patent system reform reports issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) could have a substantial...

The Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984 aims to strike a balance between the innovation incentives provided by patents and the greater consumer access provided by low-cost generic drugs. The legislation, which relies in part on an explicit link between the FDA drug approval process and the U.S. patent...

The recent explosive growth of managed health care has occurred in large part because of a recognition that we need to make cost-benefit trade-offs in health care. Managed care plans typically make cost-benefit trade-offs by giving plan physicians financial incentives to reduce medical spending...